All lectures are held in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall in Vol Walker Hall.

Despina Stratigakos

Feb. 26, 2018

This postcard features an image photographed by Heinrich Hoffmann. The scene shows
a view out the window of the Great Hall in Adolf Hitler’s country home on the Obersalzberg,
circa 1936. Courtesy Despina Stratigakos

Despina Stratigakos is an architectural historian, author and professor in the University
at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. Her books explore the intersections of power and architecture, and she has published
widely on issues of diversity in architecture.

Stratigakos will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier
Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus, as part of
the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

In her lecture, titled “Hitler’s Home Makeover: How Interior Design and Media Fluff
Helped Sell a Dictator,” Stratigakos will discuss how Adolf Hitler’s inner circle
refashioned his private persona in the mid-1930s, transforming him in the eyes of
the world’s media from oddball bachelor to country gentleman. Domestic architecture
played a key role in that public makeover, which coincided with renovations of Hitler’s
three residences – the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the
Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg.

Stratigakos will discuss how positive lifestyle stories focusing on the off-duty Hitler
and the warmth and elegance of his homes appeared not only in German newspapers and
magazines, but also in the foreign press, including in TheNew York Times, Homes and Gardens and Life magazine. By the eve of World War II, this coverage had created a powerful image
of the private Hitler as a gentle, refined man – an image that has been given new
life today by the internet. Design historians have largely ignored Hitler’s domestic
spaces as either too mundane or kitschy to deserve scholarly attention. This talk
makes the case for taking them seriously, both as design and propaganda, and for historians’
responsibility to deconstruct their lingering power.

Stratigakos received her Doctor of Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College and taught at
Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the Department of
Architecture at the University at Buffalo. Stratigakos was a member in residence at
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2016-17.

In 2007, she curated an exhibition on Architect Barbie at the University of Michigan
to focus attention on gendered stereotypes within the architectural profession. In
2011, she collaborated with Mattel on the development and launch of Architect Barbie
in the Barbie I Can Be series.

Her book Where Are the Women Architects? (2016) confronts the challenges women face in the architectural profession. Hitler at Home (2015) investigates the architectural and ideological construction of Hitler’s domesticity.
A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008), which traces the history of a forgotten female metropolis, won the German
Studies Association DAAD Book Prize and the Milka Bliznakov Research Prize.

Stratigakos has served as a director of the Society of Architectural Historians, advisor
of the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech, trustee of
the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and deputy director of the Gender Institute
at the University at Buffalo. She also participated on Buffalo’s municipal Diversity
in Architecture taskforce and was a founding member of the Architecture and Design
Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to encourage design literacy
and academic excellence.

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Why FAY?

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has received more than 110 design awards since 1995.

The Fay Jones School of Architecture was ranked 19th in the nation overall – and eighth among public universities – for 2013 in the annual survey of “America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools" published in the November/December 2012 issue of DesignIntelligence.

The project that renovated Vol Walker Hall and added the Steven L. Anderson Design Center was awarded LEED Gold certification and won a Gulf States AIA Honor Award.